Do we really help?
999
My last couple of weeks at work havenāt had anything really out of the ordinary in them. Itās been a very ordinary run of chest pains, back pains, abdominal pains, breathing problems, bleeding, and passed-out drunk people. Itās left me thinking about impostor syndrome ā something I come across both as a developer and now as a 999 call handler ā and, more widely, about something Iām calling organisational self-importance syndrome: how the ambulance service often likes to think of itself as the people swooping in to save the day. Itās not the only kind of organisation guilty of that, but thereās something about being an emergency service that seems to give it that kind of air.